The New Friend

My grandfather once attended a conference on the subject of Maimonides, and the multifarious achievements of this famous medieval Jewish polymath were made manifest in the variety of topics that were discussed. One scholar stood up and spoke of “Maimonides as a philosopher”; another addressed Maimonides’s achievements as a physician; still another spoke of the Sephardic sage as a Talmudist. At a certain point, someone sitting next to my grandfather turned to him and innocently asked: “When are they going to stop introducing Professor Maimonides and let him speak already?”

Those reading the articles in tribute to Norman Podhoretz in this issue will find so many different descriptions of who he was and the many and magnificent aspects of his life: Norman Podhoretz as a Jew, as a neoconservative, as a literary critic, as an American, as a student of the Bible, as a defender of Israel, as a hater of Communism. Rightly so. For me, however, they are, in the end, inseparable; they are all Norman, different aspects of the individual that I came to know in the past several years. For it was only in these last years that I had the privilege of spending time with him, visiting Norman in his home. It was he, at the age of 92, who  initiated our friendship, emailing me after I officiated at the funeral of his beloved wife: “I am finally beginning to venture a bit out of the isolation that Midge’s death brought about, and I was hoping that you would be one of the first visitors to help me emerge.” He also reflected that he believed he would enjoy the meetings, “though my world-famous humility prevents me from speculating what it would do for you.”

Thus warmly welcomed, I accepted the invitation. Week by week, our discussions were different; we might speak on one occasion of the Jewish education he had pursued in his teenage years in fulfillment of an oath to his father, when Norman had thought the latter was on his deathbed. Another day might bring us recollections of Norman’s literature studies in Cambridge, his encounter with T.S. Eliot, and his chagrin at the fact that, having returned to Eliot’s work decades later, it seemed the anti-Semite’s literary prowess was not as remarkable as he had thought at the time and therefore the aesthetic excuse of his greatness against the bald fact of his Jew-hatred was a more complicated matter.